Mario Biaggi, 97, Popular Bronx Congressman Who Went to Prison, Dies

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Mario Biaggi, 10-Term Bronx Congressman, Dies at 97

Mario Biaggi, 10-Term Bronx Congressman, Dies at 97

CreditNeal Boenzi/The New York Times

Mario Biaggi, a highly decorated former New York City police officer who became a popular 10-term Democratic congressman from the Bronx only to land in prison in a wave of corruption scandals in the late 1980s, died on Wednesday at his home in the Bronx. He was 97.

His death was confirmed by his spokesman, Mortimer Matz.

The rise and fall of Mr. Biaggi was a kaleidoscopic morality tale: a triumph of justice to federal prosecutors like Rudolph W. Giuliani, a tragedy to former fellow police officers, who recalled him as a hero, and a terrible loss to working-class voters, who saw him as their champion in Washington.

Born in East Harlem to Italian immigrants, he had shined shoes and delivered mail before becoming a police officer. In 23 years on the force, he was wounded 11 times, killed two suspects in self-defense and became a law-enforcement legend, winning dozens of citations for valor and national recognition.

In 19 years in the House, achieved in biennial landslides of up to 90 percent of the vote, he became the senior member of New York’s congressional delegation, a law-and-order conservative who supported labor, Israel and laws to crack down on drugs, lift local businesses, and help families and the elderly.

“No one had ever taken so direct and personal a hand in assisting constituents,” Assemblyman John Dearie, a Bronx Democrat, said after Mr. Biaggi announced his resignation in 1988. “There are thousands of people who didn’t care whether he was a Democrat or Republican or anything else. They went to Mario, and he was there for them.”

Mr. Biaggi’s downfall unfolded in stages, even as dozens of political and business leaders in the New York area were being convicted in corruption cases known as Abscam, Wedtech and the Parking Violations Bureau scandal, leaving the ethics of a decade in tatters.

For Mr. Biaggi, nearly 70 and at the peak of his career, that downfall began in 1987 with a federal indictment in Brooklyn charging that he had taken an unlawful gratuity — a $3,200 vacation at a Florida spa over the 1984-85 Christmas-New Year holidays — from Meade H. Esposito, the former Brooklyn Democratic leader.

Prosecutors called it a bribe to get Mr. Biaggi’s help for a financially ailing Brooklyn company, Coastal Dry Dock and Repair Corporation, which was a client of Mr. Esposito’s insurance firm. The defense argued that Mr. Esposito had paid the expenses out of friendship, and that Mr. Biaggi had given no favors in return.

Neither defendant testified. Both were acquitted of more serious bribery and conspiracy charges but convicted on the unlawful-gratuity counts. Mr. Biaggi was also convicted of obstructing justice. Mr. Esposito, 80, was given a suspended two-year term, but Mr. Biaggi was fined $500,000 and sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Even before the trial ended, Mr. Biaggi and five others, including his son, Richard, and Stanley Simon, a former Bronx borough president, were indicted in a second case, this one brought by Mr. Giuliani, the United States attorney in Manhattan who would go on to become mayor, and Mario Merola, the Bronx district attorney.

It accused them of turning the Wedtech Corporation in the South Bronx into a criminal enterprise that paid bribes for no-bid military contracts. The company, a major employer in a depressed area, had been hailed by President Ronald Reagan for hiring minorities and the poor.

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Mr. Biaggi in his Bronx apartment in 2007 after he turned 90.

Credit
Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

In 1988, Mr. Biaggi was convicted of 15 felonies, including extorting stock worth $1.8 million, to help Wedtech win contracts. The other defendants were also convicted, largely on testimony by company officials cooperating with the prosecution.

Mr. Biaggi was fined $242,000 and given eight years in prison. Appeals failed, and he resigned from Congress as colleagues prepared to expel him. It was too late to get his name off the 1988 primary ballot, but he was defeated by Eliot L. Engel, who went on to win the general election. After losing the Democratic nomination in the September primary, Mr. Biaggi went on the ballot as the Republican candidate for the district seat but later decided against mounting an active campaign. In spite of his inactivity, Mr. Biaggi received a third of the votes cast.

Mr. Biaggi served 26 months in prison and was released in 1991 because of what his lawyer called life-threatening heart and neurological illnesses. He sought a political comeback in 1992, but district lines had been redrawn, diluting his strengths. Despite complaining that his rival “must have gone to Lourdes” to recover so quickly, Mr. Engel easily defeated the old warrior.

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Mario Biaggi was born on Oct. 26, 1917, in a tenement on East 106th Street, the oldest of three sons of Salvatore and Mary Campari Biaggi, immigrants from Piacenza in northern Italy. His father was a marble cutter, his mother a charwoman. He graduated from Haaren High School, on the West Side of Manhattan, in 1934.

In 1940 he married the former Marie Wassil. She died in 1997.

Survivors include their daughters, Barbara Biaggi and Jacqueline Biaggi; their sons, Richard and Mario II; 11 grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

Mr. Biaggi joined the police force in 1942. Saving a woman on a runaway horse, he suffered a leg injury that left him with a rolling limp. He had many violent encounters with suspects. In 1944, he shot and killed a man who had tried to stab him with an ice pick. In 1959, he shot and killed a man who had tried to rob him at gunpoint. He was wounded in the shootout but won the Medal of Honor, the Police Department’s highest award.

Active in the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, rising to detective lieutenant, Mr. Biaggi became one of the most decorated officers in city history and was honored by national police organizations.

While he had never attended college, he received a waiver to study at New York Law School, took a leave from the force, earned a law degree in 1963 and retired in 1965 to open a law practice. He was soon making speeches for a political career.

Elected to Congress in 1968 as a Democrat in a Republican stronghold, the first of 10 victories by increasing margins, he often had Democratic, Republican and Conservative Party support. He ran for mayor in 1973, but backed out after admitting that he had refused to answer questions before a grand jury in 1971. There had been rumors of inquiries and shady dealings, but he dismissed them as politically motivated.

Mr. Biaggi, whose constituents included many Irish-Americans, was a longtime supporter of the Irish Republican cause and a leader of the Ad Hoc Congressional Committee on Irish Affairs. He visited Dublin and Belfast, and spoke for human rights in Northern Ireland. But critics said his support for militants only encouraged I.R.A. violence and accused him of trying to make political capital of a tragic conflict.

In Washington, he spearheaded legislation in 1984 that established the National Law Enforcement Memorial. In the Bronx, he worked hard for constituents — the woman who needed a nursing-home bed, the man with a Social Security problem. He was always impeccably turned out in stylish suits and ties and delivered promises in the authentic voice of Mosholu Parkway. When he grew older, the dark wavy hair went silver, and he steadied his gait with an ivory-handled cane.

But he never stopped insisting on his innocence. “Unfortunately,” he said at his 90th-birthday party in 2007, organized at a Bronx restaurant by his family and attended by a host of dignitaries and loyal former constituents, “I got caught in the middle of Giuliani’s ambitions.”

“A stalwart,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at the time. “A real hero in the annals of the New York Police Department.”

Correction: June 27, 2015

Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Friday with an obituary about Mario Biaggi, who served as a Bronx congressman, misstated the year he retired from the New York City Police Department. As the obituary correctly noted, it was 1965, not 1995.

A version of this article appears in print on June 26, 2015, on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Mario Biaggi, 97, Official Undone by Scandals, Dies. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe